AlliterAsian (13 page)

“When you were a teenager,” you say.

“No, I liked shitty pop punk then.”

He puts his giant headphones over your head, padded but leaking sound. It sounds like anything else: a low, thrumming guitar. You shut your eyes, strain hard, wanting to be transformed as he was. You want to cry for three hours.

After a few minutes—the first song hasn't ended—you open your eyes. “Maybe we should try the shitty pop punk and work our way up,” you joke. You don't say: Maybe it's like language. If it never got into your heart when you were young, it never would.

Mercury tells you about a metal club near where he grew up. They kept their side door propped open, and the smell of sweat and old beer spilled on the black-painted floor wafted out into the alleyway. Sneaking in and getting kicked out was a rite of passage; the bouncers pretended to be gruff but handled the underage kids gently. Mercury remembers his first time. The noise, the strength, the boundless energy of the band—they expressed something that had been bouncing around inside Mercury, restless and destructive. He felt released. “I'm sorry you never had that,” he said, in that voice that could be ironic, could be ironic about irony and therefore sincere again.

You still had to go to church. Sarah went to Ghana for another three months. She was also ruined, somehow. They didn't want her to lead youth group; they especially didn't want her to lead the children's prayer. She was old enough now to fly to Africa with some large interdenominational organization, without sponsorship from Pastor Rick.

Your mom would leave late on purpose, to arrive after Rick made everyone shake the hands of their pew neighbours, after coffee
and muffins, after the younger kids had been dismissed to Sunday school. Sometimes you'd even wait in the car until you heard the beginning of musical devotion, and you'd slip in together just before the doors closed. Singing, they could only glance at you from the corners of their eyes.

You kissed Joshua under the stairs. When you pulled back, he wiped his glasses on the hem of his shirt, put them back on, and squinted like he couldn't quite bring you into focus.

The summer you were fifteen, you went to a sleep-away camp in “followship”—how to be a leader in the secular world while remaining a servant of the Lord. You were gender-segregated for classes in public speaking and conflict management, and you stared out the window—a hole cut in a log wall—at the grasshoppers leaping in the dry weeds, their shrill leg-violins. A number of kids from your church came, warning the others that you were a pervert. Some girls kept track of when you went to the shower building; some promised, in cloying, prickly tones, to pray for you. Your bunkmate found a horror novel in your backpack and reported you as a Satanist.

Evenings contained a choice of choir or Bible study. For weeks, you practiced one-eighth of choral arrangements with a group of boys whose voices were roughly the same pitch as yours, though you noticed that some deeper singers—the misfits and the weirdos, the ones who were sent to the camp as punishment—also got lumped into Tenor Two. The group sounded hideous, lazily out of key, the sound of a fear of trying.

The final week of camp, the choir sections sang for the Bible studiers. You'd never rehearsed as a full group. Unaccompanied, the rickety upright piano silent, the choir sounded glorious. Your voice lost, part of one enormous human instrument, and you felt you understood heaven: part of the godhead, absorbed into nothingness,
singing His praises forever. Beauty, beauty! Tears streamed down your face. You didn't get teased for this, later. If anything, some people—girls, again—seemed jealous of your devotion, that it had been visible, plain for all to see.

At home, back in your own church, you started to lose focus during Pastor Rick's sermons. The Bible, once so unconquerably vast, seemed to contain the same few stories again and again. Pastor Rick extracted some thin thread of meaning, practical advice, about how to raise your children or treat your spouse or file your taxes. Was anyone listening? The camp girls adjusted their headbands, looked around, fiddled in the pews. The elderly parishioners in the front row had their eyes shut, nodding in agreement or sleep. You started testing God, thinking the worst thoughts you could come up with: strangling the organist, drowning the new youth leader in the baptismal pool, and pissing into the sanctified water. Exhaustive maps of desire, your mind treading men's bodies inch by inch. Strike me down, you thought, not snide, not rebellious. Strike me down, you thought, please.

But the music. The music still got you. The hymnals and the rock ballads, the raised arms and clapping. Every song like the morning after your father died, like that last night at camp. Your last connection. “Bow down thine ear, O Lord. Hear me, for I am poor and needy.”

A few months after you left for university, on the phone with your mother, she asked if you'd found a church yet. You'd met Mercury—slim-hipped, untamed facial hair; he reminded you of colour-me-Jesus, down to the cream-white skin of cheap copier paper. He was failing out slowly the same way you were, through forgetfulness. You woke together on the edge of the soccer field, unsure of the time or if you had class; you wrote papers and took exams when you remembered that you had them. A TA told you that your thoughts were unoriginal,
so Mercury tipped a plate of fish entrails into her mailbox at the start of the Thanksgiving long weekend. He took you to a concert where the audience drifted in and out of sleep on beanbags and yoga mats, and the music sounded like a muted jet engine. He dropped acid and you watched. You would both start your second year on academic probation.

You said, “Not yet,” to your mother.

“You still believe in God, though,” she said.

A moment too long, two beats instead of one. “Of course.”

That night, you screamed out your window. Until you ran out of breath, and then again. Again. The RA for your floor broke down the door to your dorm room with his shoulder. The whole building gathered in the hall to watch as he wrestled you away from the window, down from the bed where you were kneeling, hands clasped.

When you were seven, you talked to God as you walked to school. You recited psalms from memory. You told Him you lost your pencil case and were afraid to tell Mom. You told Him you wanted blond hair like the boy who sat in front of you. The rain fell softer or harder on your plastic coat.

       
A
UTHOR
C
OMMENTARY

A journalist friend who writes about religious issues once referred to me as an “apostate.” I laughed and said that the word sounded melodramatic, as though I had led a revolt and set fire to the church on my way out. I was a childhood Baptist, and like many people—and the main character in “Mercury”—I lost my faith slowly, over many years: first in the fallible humans who compose a specific congregation, then in dogma, and finally in god himself. The absence of god, when you once believed, can leave a wound, a pit in the dirt of your soul. For me, it was there that the seed of this story embedded itself, germinated, and grew. —
Kim Fu, 2015

       
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Kim Fu is the author of the novel
For Today I Am a Boy
(HarperCollins, 2014), a
New York Times Book Review
Editors' Choice, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Edmund White Award, and a Lambda Literary Award, and longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan Prize and Canada Reads. She has written for
The Atlantic
, NPR,
Maisonneuve
, and the
National Post
, among many others. Fu is a graduate of the University of British Columbia MFA program and lives in Seattle.

Days of Being Wild

Ricepaper
18, no. 3 (2013)

Doretta Lau

That fall in New York, most of my thoughts had to do with pain or grief. I was not suicidal. Rather, my grandmother had died a few months earlier and I was slowly recovering from the loss. I did not know how to talk about my pain, so I often drank until I could no longer feel my hands or feet. Insomnia took hold of me. I lay in bed and watched movies until five or six a.m., taking careful notes for the screenplay I was supposed to complete to attain my Master's degree. Though four months had passed since the end of course-work, I was still working on the first act. No matter how many hours I sat in front of my computer, I could not advance the plot of the film. My characters were flat. Each line of dialogue I wrote felt like an affront to the English language.

Everyone I attracted during this time was equally preoccupied with various miseries. A PhD history student who lived in my building, Kenichi Kingsley, considered me his only friend in the city. I am not sure what qualified me for this honour. I had not sought out his friendship, nor had I been particularly kind to him when we first met. To be honest, I had been wary of him because he was attractive in a movie star sort of way. My mother had often warned me that beautiful men lacked a conscience.

Kenichi was on antidepressants, which made him an undesirable drinking companion—he was incomprehensibly drunk after only two beers. Yet, he insisted upon drinking with me on Thursday nights, after his course on the modern history of Japan. It was one
of the few fixed appointments on my calendar. We always went to the same restaurant, and we always sat at the bar. Our friendship was a habit, like smoking or biting one's nails to the quick.

“I hate the guys in my class,” Kenichi said, after a large gulp of beer. “Most of them have or want Japanese wives or girlfriends.”

“Isn't that what you want, too? A girl like your mother?” It was easy for me to rile him because his fears were so similar to my own—we thought that we were doomed to become the sort of people we most despised.

“Shut up.” He smacked my arm, hard.

“Is the seating in your class segregated? Does it feel like the South that Flannery O'Connor depicts in her stories, except with Asian protagonists?”

“If you're asking me where I sit—I sit with the Japanese kids.” Kenichi scowled at me. He considered himself one hundred percent Japanese, though he had a British father whom he barely remembered. Kenichi had lived with his mother in Japan for most of his life and had attended boarding school in England. A few weeks after I met him, I entered the bathroom in his apartment and noticed that he had covered all the mirrors with vintage wallpaper. He later confessed that he couldn't bear to look at his reflection because he strongly resembled his father, whom he hated.

“I bet all the women in your class love you,” I said. “You look like Daniel Henney or Dennis Oh.”

“You watch too many Korean dramas.”

“I'm attracted to tragedy.”

“This is why we're friends.”

I raised my shot of bourbon. “To tragedy.”

We drained our glasses. Then we had another. As usual, Kenichi became a slurring mess once he finished his second beer.

“You have to catch up,” he said, pushing my drink towards me. “Drink faster.”

I was on my fourth bourbon. “Catch up? You're the one who's behind.”

“You're not on meds.” He began to slide down in his seat. “Because of the meds, I'm way ahead of you.”

“Maybe you shouldn't drink.”

He tried to sit up. He began staring at my face as if there was an answer to an important question on it.

“You're the only person I know who isn't afraid to be unhappy.”

I didn't know what to say. Wasn't unhappiness something sensible people avoided? Before I could answer, a woman leaned in between us, facing Kenichi, and asked, “What time is it?”

“Ask her,” he said, pointing to me. “I'm not wearing a watch.”

This was a lie. Kenichi was wearing a watch. I could see this, and so could the woman.

The woman didn't turn. She stepped closer to him; it was clear that she didn't care what time it was. Strange women approached Kenichi all the time. They seemed to think that he might be a cure for their loneliness.

“It's time for us to go home,” I said, standing. Kenichi stumbled as he stood, and took hold of my arm. I gestured towards the bar. “There's a clock over there.”

We walked to our building. The sky was clear, and the air was crisp in that perfect autumn way.

“Why are you still in New York?” Kenichi's voice was steady. He sounded sober.

“I'm working on my screenplay.”

“If it was done, would you stay?”

“Sometimes when I'm walking down the street, it still feels like
I'm watching the city on TV.”

“It's not home.”

“No,” I said. I had been in New York for over two years. I couldn't pass for a New Yorker, but to most people, I appeared to be an American from the West Coast unless I said, “about” or “sorry.” In those days, I said sorry as often as I said please or thank you. I have since broken that Canadian habit of apologizing for minor mishaps such as accidentally brushing against someone on a crowded subway train, but my accent remains the same.

“So, why are you still here?”

“I need to finish the screenplay.”

“You could write it from anywhere.”

“I guess so. I like living here. Every day feels new and strange.”

In many ways, the United States remained a mystery to me despite a childhood informed with American television, movies, and books. Though we had lived in New York for several years, Kenichi and I were unable to form an opinion about Americans or their culture. The only Americans with whom we had meaningful interactions came from a certain class. The Americans we knew had attended private schools and liberal arts colleges, if not Ivy League universities. Many spoke of summers at the Cape, as if it was the only such land formation in the world. The future held promise for all of them; when they spoke of being broke, it was only a transitory state. For most, money loomed in their futures, whether through job prospects, inheritances or marriage. Once, while drinking overpriced cocktails at a bar not fancy enough to warrant the outrageous cost, a classmate spoke at length about how she “could not afford anything” because of tuition and I could not keep my eyes off her thirty-thousand-dollar engagement ring.

“Good night,” said Kenichi in a sleepy tone.

“Night.”

We parted ways. The first time we met, we were standing in the lobby checking our respective mailboxes when he asked me if I was the tenant who watched Wong Kar-wai films late at night. I apologized (“I'm sorry”) but he said, “Oh, no, I don't mind. I live in the apartment next to yours.”

“Kingsley?” I asked, remembering the name on the intercom outside the building.

“Yes. My first name is Kenichi.”

“Sophie,” I said.

“Sophie, do you want to go see
2046
?”

“With you?” I said.

He ignored my question. “There's an advance screening tomorrow. I have two tickets.”

We went. We were ambivalent about the movie, but we liked each other's company.

I entered my apartment to find that my roommate, Sarah, was asleep. I tried to step softly past her room, but alcohol lent my gait an uncharacteristic heaviness. It didn't help that I was wearing heels and walking across a hardwood floor. Though I had been raised not to wear shoes indoors, I followed the customs of Sarah and my previous two roommates, and kept my shoes in my bedroom. Rather than bathing at night, I bathed in the morning. I had made small changes to my personal habits so as not to irk my roommates even though New York was only a chapter in my personal narrative. I knew that one day, when I was no longer paying tuition, the United States would not want me within its borders, and I would have to move on.

Ever since my grandmother died, I had been avoiding Sarah. She
had what passed for happiness, and I did not want to impose on her because she was in the last stages of her dissertation. I was hardly ever home, and when I was, it was usually past midnight. Sarah was a morning person. Our schedules did not mesh.

During the day I worked on my screenplay in the library. When I say work, I mean to say I watched films in the Butler Media Center, and took copious notes. I was in possession of eleven medium-size black notebooks filled with pedestrian thoughts on hundreds of films. There was a notebook devoted to zombie movies, and another one on vampire flicks. I devoted two entire volumes on heists, trying to figure out just what made
Le cercle rouge
and
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
so appealing to me. No genre was beneath my notice.

Though I didn't believe that it was possible for me to fall in love, I watched romantic comedies. I knew that I would have a better chance of selling a love story than an action film because I was a woman. That was supposed to be my territory: shopping and grooming and courtship and marriage.

I was so lost during this time that I thought that seeking order and predictability would free me in some way. Therefore, the teen comedy
My Boyfriend's Back
merited the same careful attention as Ingmar Bergman's
The Seventh Seal
. I read movie reviews online and academic essays in obscure journals, believing I would find the formula for success. My compulsive research did not gain me exit from the hell that was writer's block. I began to hate opening Final Draft on my computer. The cursor on the blank screen seemed to mock me with its steady blink.

Aside from grief, during this period my other constant preoccupation was money. I had mounting student loans; my inability to finish
writing the screenplay prevented my graduating in a timely manner. I wanted very much to finish. I devoted hours to sitting in quiet places, writing outlines for the second and third acts of my film. But as I sat in front of my computer, I felt like I was a failure. I would never be able to write anything worth watching. No one would ever want to buy my screenplay and turn it into a movie.

This paralysis seemed too much to overcome. When I was tired of working on my screenplay, I turned to odd jobs. This was against the terms of my student visa, but somehow it made me feel better. Each morning, I scanned job postings and emails in search of a few dollars. Though my great-grandfather had been a scholar, his fortune had been lost even before the Communist era and all the older men in my family were labourers. Writing did not seem a particularly honest way of earning a living. When I reported what I was doing to my parents, it sounded lazy. Who of their generation could believe that watching a film constituted real research? There were times when I thought I should have attended law school instead; I was an excellent reader and researcher, and I was relentless at completing tasks when I felt there was little at stake.

Most nights I could not sleep thinking that my father could have retired early had I not decided to pursue my film school insanity. This only compounded my fears of failing to complete my screenplay.

Kenichi called me, begging me to accompany him to a party a student from his cohort was hosting. “I don't want to go—but you know how it is,” he said. “I have to make an appearance.”

“Can't you go alone?” I could think of many things I'd rather do with my evening than attend a party thrown by one of Kenichi's acquaintances, such as defrost my refrigerator or alphabetize my DVD collection.

“I'll get you drunk before we go.”

“Do you really want to have a drunk guest at a school function?”

“It's not really a school function. And since when have you been that kind of drunk girl? Besides, I'll behave better if you're there. Even when you're intoxicated, you're sensible.”

“Come over with a bottle of Maker's Mark.” I disliked many of Kenichi's cohort, but some of them amused me, like specimens in a freak show. After four bourbons, we arrived at the party at eleven-thirty. I was verging on belligerence. When I drank, I said cruel things about strangers and acquaintances, cutting remarks I would not utter while sober. Whether alcohol was a truth serum or demonic possession, I wasn't quite sure.

As we stepped into the living room, Jenna Kim—the girlfriend of an American named Chad or Chuck or Chandler who specialized in Joseon Dynasty history and who directed all his conversation at my breasts whenever I had the bad luck of speaking with him—was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room. Her skirt was hiked up to her waist, and she wasn't wearing panties.

She had a cigarette in one hand, and was blowing smoke out of her vagina. Jenna was famous for this at parties. She called it her “Singapore hooker trick.”

“Oh, fuck, not again,” I said loudly. “I need another drink.” I went into the kitchen. Kenichi followed.

“Is this type of behaviour common at parties in North America?” he asked, amused.

“She's such a fucking moron,” I said. “Singapore is the least likely Asian setting for this kind of desperate sex work. I mean, if she had said Thai hooker trick, I'd still be annoyed with her, but at least she wouldn't come across as utterly stupid. She has no sense of political and socio-economic realities in different Asian countries. You'd think
all of Asia was poor and backwards from her estimation of Singapore.”

Kenichi laughed. “She's got a cigarette in her pussy and you're thinking about socio-economic factors and its influence on prostitution?”

“Whatever. I was saying that she's a stupid self-hating attention-seeking bitch. I bet she thinks she's a feminist. She probably writes poetry using feet binding as a metaphor for her dislike of her father, even though her family is Korean.”

“Let's punish her by finishing off her soju.” Kenichi held up a couple of green bottles.